The New Jerusalem Bible

Lately I used a passage from the Book of Daniel as the master symbol for the opening of a radio play. The play was called ‘Mr Brandywine Chooses a Gravestone’ – it was about a man of Catholic though subdued belief who finds that he has three months to live, and what he does and dreams and thinks in the effort to adjust to this very unwelcome news. I don’t know whether my guardian angel takes an interest in my literary activities; I tend to think of him as standing to one side and sighing gently while waiting for me to turn my attention to the more spiritually fruitful matters of household crises and calamities, or to my much neglected prayers; but on this occasion I did seem to receive a slight nudge.

A priest from the Holy Cross Seminary had come into my office for a yarn. I think at one point he had to leave the room. At any rate, he left his breviary on my desk – he had explained to me that priests refer to their breviary as their ‘wife’, and I did not like to think of him as even temporarily widowed – but the occasion was of benefit to me, for I picked up his breviary and opened it in a vague way with the problem of the opening of the radio play incubating somewhere in my mind – and there was the passage I didn’t yet know I needed, right in front of my eyes. I copied it down rapidly –

So the King ordered Daniel to be brought and cast into the lions’ den. To Daniel he said, ‘May your God, whom you serve so constantly, save you.’ To forestall any tampering, the king sealed with his own ring and the rings of the lords the stone that had been brought to block the opening of the den. . . .

In the King James Version, that pillar and foundation stone of English literature, the passage runs rather differently:

Then the king commanded, and they brought Daniel, and cast him into the den of lions. Now the king spake and said to Daniel, ‘Thy God whom thou servest continually, he will deliver thee.’ And a stone was brought, and page 245 laid upon the mouth of the den; and the king sealed it with his own signet, and with the signet of his lords; that the purpose might not be changed concerning Daniel. . . .

Again, in the Knox Version, the passage runs differently again –

At last the king gave orders Daniel should be sent for and shut up in the lion pit. So faithful a servant, he told him, thy God must needs deliver. And with that a stone was brought and set down at the pit’s entrance which the king sealed and his nobles both; there should be no interfering with Daniel. . . .

And naturally enough, in the Jerusalem Bible, from which, in this article, I can at most only pluck a thread or two, to get some faint indication of the texture of the fabric – there is yet another version:

The king then ordered Daniel to be fetched and thrown into the lion pit. The king said to Daniel, ‘Your God himself, when you have served so faithfully, will have to save you.’ A stone was then brought and laid over the mouth of the pit; and the king sealed it with his own signet and with that of his noblemen. . . .

Having no knowledge of Hebrew – and little enough of Latin – I cannot judge the accuracy of these various translations; I can only record that the version in the priest’s breviary (which, I imagine, came from the Douai translation of the Vulgate or some later variant of this) suited my literary purposes down to the ground. It was monumental and exact, like blocks of stone laid end to end. It reverberated in the mind.

The King James Version is a trifle dated and archaic; the Knox Version gives the impression of having been shoved and hammered into place with a literary effort; and the Jerusalem version seems just to tell the story and leave it at that.

There are also variations in meaning. The king, in the King James Version, is definitely optimistic – he is sure that God will deliver Daniel; in the Knox Version he feels that it is incumbent on God to do so; in the Jerusalem Version he says in effect that God will have to, since no one else will. But in the breviary version, without obvious hope or foreknowledge, he makes a vibrant and melancholy prayer that God will do it, with a rather piercing implication of the sad and affectionate respect of a non-believer for a militant believer bent on martyrdom. It is, I think, the deeper and more human version.

Again, there is the matter of the choice between ‘den’ and ‘pit’ and ‘ring’ and ‘signet’ – the word ‘den’ has emotional implications quite different from the word ‘pit’. In reaching a radio audience who (whether Christian or not) would often have heard, by way of the King James Version, of – ‘Daniel in the lions’ den’ – but never ‘Daniel in the lions’ pit’ – one could, by using the word ‘den’, make sure of a certain basic subconscious reaction. And the kings in fairytales (I’m not suggesting that the story of Daniel is a fairytale) frequently page 246 use rings, with more or less magical properties; but they don’t use signets – signets belong solely to historical personages. For a literary and symbolic use, I found the breviary version of the most use.

‘All right,’ you may say, ‘very interesting; but do Mr Baxter’s literary intentions matter much? For use in public worship or private devotion, all we need is a plain, unadorned, contemporary text, as exact as possible, with no literary frills.’

I agree. Yet, especially in an ecumenical age, one has to remember that for the majority of English-speaking people the King James Version is Holy Writ; some of them may even think Christ spoke in English; those particular English words and phrases are imbedded in the depths of their minds. To lessen the barrier between Catholic and Protestant religious attitudes and practice, no single thing could do more than a complete recognition by Catholic scholars that the King James Version is the Bible of the English-speaking world, and a tailoring of translations to allow for this fact. I think the Jerusalem Bible leans sufficiently in this direction, and I am glad of it.

Probably a multiplicity of translations are necessary, for different and various purposes – a scholars’ bible, let us say, with copious linguistic footnotes; a children’s bible, plain and simple and bare, yet with secret undertones of legend that is all the more enthralling because it is basically true. And of course a common man’s bible, with everything very matter-of-fact – I am joking, you understand; but I hope, if the joke ever became a reality, that the bible made for literary men would include many versions taken direct from a priest’s breviary, and thus originally from the patron saint of literary men, old Jerome himself, who sweated on the Vulgate (he was contemporary; he was ‘with it’; he was being thrashed by angels before the Judgment Seat for subconsciously preferring Greek and Latin authors to the Hebrew prophets).

I do not like chatty translations of the Scriptures. There are several well-intentioned modern Protestant versions that err in this respect. I do not want to have the impression that I am watching Our Lord and His Apostles on a late-night TV session. In my childhood and youth, when I was an undenominational Christian, my knowledge of God’s intentions in regard to man came solely from the austere, archaic, ornate King James Version; and when I had bad dreams, I slept with it under my pillow like a sacramental. When I read Knox’s translation of the New Testament I was delighted; here at last was a gentle, lucid account of what one wished most to know. After the King James Version, it was like clear glass windows that let the light through without hindrance in place of stained glass that had at least in some measure blurred and dispersed it. For devotional reading of the New Testament, I think I will always use the Knox Version; I have the impression that Monsignor Knox knew Our Lord’s mind intuitively and most intimately, especially where it is a matter of some delicate balance page 247 between justice and mercy; and there is no scholarly substitute for that gift in a translator, though Knox was also a great scholar. But for devotional reading of the Old Testament, I think from now on I will use the Jerusalem Bible. Consider this magnificent Hebrew poem:

The Assyrian Invasion

He hoists a signal for a distant nation,
he whistles it up from the ends of the earth;
and look, it comes, swiftly, promptly.

None of them faint or weary,
none sleeping or drowsy,
none of them with belt loose,
none with sandal-straps broken.

Its arrows are sharpened,
its bows all bent,
the hoofs of its horses are like flint,
its chariot-wheels like tornadoes.

Its roar is the roar of a lioness,
like a lion cub it roars,
it grows and it seizes its prey,
it bears it off, and no one can snatch it back.

Growling against it, that day,
like the growling of the sea.
Only look at the country: darkness and distress,
and the light flickers out in shadows.

One had to honour the miracle of the freshness of this translation that brings a poem to light from the pedestrian layers of history, like a sharpened flint dug up on a camp-site. It comes from the fifth chapter of the first part of the Book of Isaiah.

A vast amount of the writings of the prophets which was previously impenetrable reading for us has been made comprehensible by the dedicated labours of the makers of the Jerusalem Bible – they have pierced the vein of the true Hebraic tradition, and the blood flows again for us. I think I know it is the true vein by way of my own amateur studies in Jewish theology and literature. Perhaps we will not like having to address God as ‘Yahweh’ – the hierarchy in England have already enjoined the use of the Jerusalem Bible in churches, with the proviso that the faithful should not be obliged to say page 248 ‘Yahweh’ – but our children and our children’s children will have no such difficulty. Children learn new things easily. For them, no doubt, Yahweh will be the name of God, as Jehovah has been His name for us.

So I move in fascination round this great ‘corpus’, this daring and significant and scholarly new translation, like a small dog inspecting the body of a whale. It is all I can do. But there is one crux for the translator of the Scriptures, which he either carries and succeeds, or fails to carry and falls in the mud. I refer to the letters of St Paul, in particular those passages in which he discusses the priesthood of Our Lord – wholly impenetrable in the King James Version, still a tangled thicket in most other versions. In the Jerusalem Bible the way has been made clear, by a careful untwining of the threads of argument. It reads now as no doubt it reads to those men for whom it was first intended, as a closely reasoned but lucid part of an encyclical on theological matters. This triumph is a mark of the success of the Jerusalem Bible. The occasional obvious misprint or textual clumsiness is nothing but a fleabite compared to it. And this new gigantic labour, performed under ecumenical conditions, will be of benefit to all Christians, in accord with the intentions of the Second Vatican Council, and the prayer that Pope John made in the middle of his sacrificial death agony – ‘That they may be one’.

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